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We did not have the time to learn

everything that we wanted to know

Retma’s epitaph for Man in A Clash of Cymbals

The science fiction of James Blish presents us with a number of pleasurable dichotomies. Under the cloak of technological activity, he is a visionary of an old-fashioned kind, able, like Blake, to hold infinity in his hand. Such visionaries usually speak out against technology; but Blish saw in technology a chance to bring us nearer to the seat of knowledge, which – I hope to show – he equated with wisdom. Technology and the advance of science, in Blish’s view, bring us nearer to the ends and beginnings of things which loom so largely in Blishian cosmologies.

Windows on eternity open in all his novels. I knew Blish well for several years before his death in 1975 and he often spoke fondly of his early novel, Fallen Star (The Frozen Year, US title). A window on eternity opens early in that novel:

‘My post gave me a direct view of the magnificent photograph, about four by six, which was hanging over Ellen’s desk. It looked like a star caught in the act of blowing up – as, in miniature, it was; the photo was an enlargement from a cosmic-ray emulsion-trace, showing a heavy primary nucleus hitting a carbon atom in the emulsion and knocking it to bits, producing a star of fragment-traces and a shower of more than two hundred mesons.

Nobody with any sense of the drama implicit in a photograph like that – a record of the undoing of one of the basic building blocks of the universe, by a bullet that had travelled unknowable millions of years and miles to effect the catastrophe – could have resisted asking for a closer look.’

In asking for a closer look at the photograph, Julian Cole becomes involved as a journalist on the International Geophysical Year expedition to the Arctic. A member of the expedition, Joseph Wentz, dies, and a short oration is made over his dead body by Farnsworth, the leader of the expedition. The oration includes these words: ‘If You [God] … exist, and if You are still thinking about men, think of Joe Wentz. He admired Your fine workmanship in the stars, and never reproached You for spoiling him.’

Another member of the expedition responds angrily, ‘It is proven: He never punishes crime; He cares nothing for stars; why should He care about man?’ Much of Blish’s work is devoted to answering this question. Is there a God? Does he care? Can we achieve answers to these vital questions by pushing science (knowledge) to its extremes?

Juxtaposed, these questions form a central riddle, the nature of which changes slightly throughout Blish’s long career. Blish never satisfactorily answers the riddle himself. This may imply a failure as a theoretical novelist, but the riddle is often embodied in an image of great power; this is his success as a poet. The riddle is given form in Fallen Star, for instance, by the little pebble which Farnsworth embeds in an ordinary ice cube.

The pebble is a tektite fallen to Earth from the region of the asteroid belt, and consists of sedimentary rock. The implications of this find are tremendous. An asteroidal protoplanet once existed which supported oceans for a long period. So its climate must have been warmer than Mars; it must have had an atmosphere. A later discovery carries these theories further. There was life on the planet. And it was destroyed by the Martians within the period of Man’s span on Earth. There has been War in Heaven. As Farnsworth says – ‘Cosmic history in an ice cube!’

These and similar preoccupations explain why Blish felt such admiration for C. S. Lewis, to whose memory Black Easter is dedicated. Yet Blish is of what we may term the Campbell Generation; his work bears at least superficial resemblances to the other writing forged on John W. Campbell’s anvil. The Okie series, for example, gathered into book form as Cities in Flight, ran in serial form over a number of years in Campbell’s Astounding. Beneath the galactic gallivantings, however, lies something more hard-headed than anything in Heinlein, more intellectual than anything in Asimov, and more immense than anything in Van Vogt. Moreover, that something has little in common with the two SF writers Blish most admired, Henry Kuttner and Cyril Kornbluth, for he rarely attempts the romantic and satiric modes in which Kuttner and Kornbluth are most successful.

In their spirit of enquiry, Blish’s novels are centrally science fictional. It is in the direction of that enquiry that Blish’s originality lies. We can only hope that some critic will come along and investigate his whole considerable oeuvre for us, revealing Blish’s true stature. I hope to point to a few lines of enquiry in this essay.

One main topic in the Astounding to which Blish contributed his early stories may be summed up in that striking phrase of Winston Churchill’s: ‘The Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science.’ Campbell’s writers, whatever they might profess on the surface, were ambivalent regarding the virtues of the future world to which they saw themselves progressing as the outriders of culture. Time and time again, their stories dramatise experiments which – like those of Wernher von Braun in real life – metaphorically aim for the stars but hit London. Only in the stories of Isaac Asimov do we glimpse some kind of ordered and rational future. Yet, in the most popular of all sagas to emerge from Campbell’s forge, Asimov’s Foundation, (the title of that civilisation which Hari Seldon must preserve against the forces of decline) culture has nothing to do with the arts and humanities: it signifies merely an extrapolated twentieth-century technology which encases Trantor in metal, opposed by a barbarism which rides in spaceships.

Blish’s conception of culture and of science is more profound: he sees beneath them to their warring source. He perceived how every civilisation is dominated by a few major ideas and how these ideas become gradually outmoded, dooming the culture concerned; the fate of the Martians in Fallen Star is not that their planet has lost its atmosphere, but that they ‘have gone frozen in the brains’. Blish appreciated the seminal value of the pre-Classical culture in Greece, and dismissed out of hand Campbell’s assertion that ‘Homer was a barbarian’. Ideas infused from other sources can regenerate older cultures, as is demonstrated in Dr Mirabilis, the biography of the ‘miraculous doctor’, Roger Bacon, over which Blish laboured so long. The same seminal thought moved Blish to yoke four totally distinct books, A Case of Conscience, Black Easter, The Day After Judgement, and Mirabilis, together as an uncomfortable tetralogy entitled After Such Knowledge. His obsession with the true scientific nature of cultures is dramatised in The Seedling Stars which owes much to Olaf Stapledon. There an Adapted Man is not so much a man as an Idea from Earth, inserted into an alien environment to regenerate it (the reverse of the situation in Fallen Star).

The Seedling Stars is ultimately crude because the grand experiment of seeding stars takes little account of the feelings of the living beings forced to participate in the experiment, despite the moralising about the venture which goes on. Blish was interested in morality as a consciousness structure, while singularly lacking conventional moral tone. Individual lives rarely moved him. What concerned him was connecting together incompatible structures; he had come to believe, through Oswald Spengler, that there were no eternal verities, not even in the mathematics which is the basis of culture; hence his pre-occupation with eschatology.

A passage in Spengler’s Decline of the West must have attracted Blish’s attention, and certainly is relevant to the present day.

‘The modern mathematic, though “true” only for the Western spirit, is undeniably a master-work of that spirit; and yet to Plato it would have seemed a ridiculous and painful aberration from the path leading to the “true” – to wit, the Classical – mathematic. And so with ourselves. Plainly, we have almost no notion of the multitude of great ideas belonging to other Cultures that we have suffered to lapse because our thought with its limitations has not permitted us to assimilate them, or (which comes to the same thing) has led us to reject them as false, superfluous, and nonsensical.’

Our culture, sensing that the numbers in the Renaissance hour-glass are running out, is now trying belatedly to derive notations from other cultures previously ignored. Hence such manifestations as Tao Physics – and possibly SF itself.

Throughout Blish’s writing, we find two predominant preoccupations: that some culture or phase of culture is coming to an end (generally with a new beginning implied in that end) and that fresh ideas transfigure culture. Both these preoccupations find resolution in concepts of number. What excites him is not the individual – how could it, given those preoccupations – but the alembic of mathematics.

So his books conclude with cryptic sentences, the like of which never was on land or sea.

‘Earth isn’t a place. It’s an idea.’

God is dead.

‘And so, by winning all, all have I lost.’

Creation began.

Then he, too, was gone, and the world was ready to begin.

This last is the final line of one of Blish’s less appreciated novels, A Torrent of Faces, written with Norman L. Knight and, like Dr Mirabilis, a slow growth. It concerns – so the author tells us – a utopia of over-population. Blish did not regard this as a contradiction in terms. Again, numbers exercised their appeal. He says, ‘Our future world requires one hundred thousand cities with an average population of ten million people each. This means that there would have to be seven such cities in an area as small as Puerto Rico, about twelve to sixteen miles apart, if the cities are spread evenly all over the world in a checkerboard pattern.’ This culture survives only because a large portion of mankind lives under the oceans.

A Torrent of Faces is a cascade of figures. Every conversation seems to flow with them. As Kim and Jothen fly towards the mountain range of Chicago, she tells him, ‘Somewhere inside is the headquarters of the Civic Medical Services. I was born there. Every day approximately fifteen thousand babies are born there. The nine outlying regional centres produce about the same number daily …’ And so on. It is all rather like the scene at the end of A Clash of Cymbals where, heading for the collapse of the universe at the metagalactic centre of the universe, Hazelton borrows Amalfi’s slide-rule to do a few setting-up exercises.

This is not just a ploy to baffle us with prestidigitation; the power of numbers is a real thing for Blish. In A Clash of Cymbals, it creates a new universe. Amalfi, the hero of the Okie saga, becomes the godhead, the very substance of the new universe (‘the elements of which he and the suit were composed flash into pleasure …’). Never was life everlasting achieved on such a scale.

This apocalyptic idea of one state of being leading to another is fundamental to a number of Blish’s novels and stories: one system of thought similarly supersedes another. Poor scientific Roger Bacon, arriving at Westminster, occupies a room foul with marsh gas from the sewer below; when he ignites it and blows himself up, he believes it to have been a visitation by the devil.

Blish’s work as a whole is remarkable for the visitations it numbers from both devils and angels. They were perhaps his way of injecting a conflicting irrational idea into the rationalism of Campbellian SF. Such creatures earn themselves a book title – The Night Shapes. This is not one of Blish’s best novels; perhaps Darkest Africa, with uneasy references to Rider Haggard – though E. R. Burroughs is nearer to the mark – suited the Blishian temperament less well than the Arctic. A terrible valley, likened to Eden, ‘burns out’ (and so becomes Hell?), releasing the night shapes. ‘The night shapes aren’t animals, or men, or demons, even to begin with. They’re the ideas of evil for which those real things only stand. The real things are temporary. They can be hunted. But the shapes are inside us. They’ve always lived there. They always will.’

The context does not support the premise. But the premise of such night shapes often supported Blish.

Not only did he see them as convenient shorthand for an alien system of thought intruding itself on the cartesian universe, he had a markedly individual belief in Good and Evil. Through his windows on eternity he watched the Fall re-enacted. His purest version of the Fall is played out on Lithia, the planet in A Case of Conscience, the first volume of After Such Knowledge. That ponderous title, After Such Knowledge, is a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ Nobody earns forgiveness in Blish’s worlds; the math is against it. Religion’s no help. Even the Devil has to suffer by taking up the burdens of God at the end of The Day After Judgement.

Not that Blish believes in or asks us to believe in actual devils. But he has an interest in them which some might find excessive. He likes to hold the proposition open, if only as one of ‘the multitude of great ideas belonging to other cultures’ (devils being far from a Christian prerogative); perhaps he teased himself by the quotation from C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters used in Black Easter: ‘There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive or unhealthy interest in them.’

The night shapes in the African valley soon found more sophisticated embodiment. When devils materialise in Death Valley (in The Day After Judgement), the whole world is under threat. Language is used as a defence against them, as language has conjured them, US military intelligence protects the troops from the dreadful knowledge of demons by use of typical military double-talk:

‘Enemy troops are equipped with individual body armour. In accordance with ancient Oriental custom, this armour has been designed and decorated in various grotesque shapes, in the hope of frightening the opposition. It is expected that the American soldier will simply laugh at this primitive device.’

Earth has become a hinterland of Hell. This is the Blishian law: close to home, devils appear. Farther away from Earth, apparitions become more celestial. Not only is Mother Earth inescapably soiled by her fecundity; Blish shares the belief, common to many American SF writers of his generation, that for Man to remain on Earth is to invite stagnation (as if the Chinese show any signs of stagnation by remaining in China).

Lithia, only forty light-years away from Earth, may or may not be the province of the devil. But far away, far from home in the centre of the galaxy, in the light, in the Heart Stars, there we find angels. ‘Inside that vast dust cloud called the Greater Coal Sack, the Angels orbited and danced in their thousands, creatures older than the planets, older than the suns, many of them as old as the universe itself.’

What, we may well wonder, lies behind the fantastic notion of a localised evil, and of a heaven accessible to star-travellers? Are we to regard this as just another mad sci-fi idea, or take it seriously, perhaps as an extended version of John Donne’s lovely paradox:

At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow

Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise

From death?

Deploying this vision through several books, Blish demands we take serious notice of it if we are to take him seriously.

So what are all these angels and devils doing, flitting so anachronistically through modern science fiction? The answers are complex, and spring from the complex nature of James Blish, who contained in himself much of the crabbed knowledge and temperament of his star, Roger Bacon. Sometimes, we are meant to take the devils literally, as in Black Easter and The Day After Judgement; sometimes, they are deployed more metaphorically. As for the vast distance wherein we are purified, where we may meet with angels, they also represent passages of time, during which knowledge and judgement can be achieved. Several Blishian heroes make at least part of the journey, and acquire part-purification.

One who makes it all the way is Mayor John Amalfi. He becomes more than angel, God (a reversal of the way in which the Devil becomes God by visiting Earth in Day After Judgement – here the factors of the equation are transposed). For it is Amalfi, of all Blish’s human characters, who travels farthest; and the anti-agathics which make him nearly immortal ensure that he can travel almost forever. So in Blishian terms he has to head away from Earth. At the end of Clash of Cymbals, he reaches metagalactic centre, where a new universe is coming into being. Amalfi virtually creates that new universe, in one orgasmic burst of parthenogenesis.

This climax is Blish’s most daring reach for balance, for a treaty between good and evil, armistice between love and death. But the longing for treaty, for balance, is continually expressed, often in metaphor. There is a wish to see standard religion take its place beside a rigorous science (typically, in A Case of Conscience); then demons will become mere humans in armour and humans angels without armour.

The contradictions between antipathetic systems are ones Blish is constantly driven to bridge. In a memorable story entitled ‘Bridge’ (later incorporated into the tetralogy Cities in Flight, as part of the novel They Shall Have Stars), he dramatises the journey of a man across a perilous ice bridge on Jupiter, a bridge which represents the joining of two incompatible systems, since the man is not on Jupiter in actuality but illusion. An actual crossing of the ice bridge can never be achieved. Oppositions admit of no real bridges, or not under any math at present accessible to us.

It was towards such a bridge that Blish worked. His writing slowly becomes more concentrated towards the problems of knowledge and evil (that is, if we exclude the volumes of Star Trek which Blish turned out – for money but also, presumably, for relief from his pursuit of his dark quarry). The devils become thicker, the angels fewer.

In two renowned stories, Blish subsumes the symbolic angels and devils into mathematical functions.

In ‘Common Time’, Garrard is the pilot of an experimental inter-stellar vessel, capable of accelerating to near-light velocities. He finds himself undergoing extreme time-dilation.

‘During a single day of ship-time, Garrard could get in more thinking than any philosopher on Earth could have managed during an entire lifetime. Garrard could, if he disciplined himself sufficiently, devote his mind for a century to running down the consequences of a single thought, down to the last detail, and still have millenia left to go on to the next thought. What panoplies of pure reason could he not have assembled by the time 6,000 years had gone by? With sufficient concentration, he might come up with a solution to the Problem of Evil between breakfast and dinner of a single ship’s day, and in a ship’s month might put his finger on the First Cause!’

The passage carries a reminder of Sir Thomas Browne, physician of Norwich whose writings Blish enjoyed (‘Julius Scaliger, who in a sleepless fit of the gout could make two hundred verses in a night, would have but five plain words upon his tomb …’). The quotation from ‘Common Time’ gains vigour from deployment of similar antitheses. It is the mark of a genuine writer that, in the fibres of one characteristic sentence, he delivers a minute image of his whole thought, much as physicists once believed the whole solar system was modelled in the atom.

Without being aware of any contradiction, Garrard leaps between sentences from dreaming of ‘panoplies of pure reason’ to solving the Problem of Evil, as if he (or rather Blish) believes Evil could be resolved by Reason; the two questions are presented not as oppositions but complementaries. ‘Common Time’ was published in 1953, in the same year as first publication of A Case of Conscience. In A Case of Conscience also, Evil seems curiously to be something only discernible by tortuous reason. How fortunate, then, that Ruiz-Sanchez happens to combine the function of scientist and priest.

One of the tokens of Lithian evil is the mystery surrounding mating and birth on the planet. Chtexa, a Lithian with whom Ruiz-Sanchez talks, explains that he is living alone because no female has chosen him to fecundate her eggs that season. The priest asks, ‘And how is the choice determined? Is it by emotion, or by reason alone?’

‘The two are in the long run the same,’ replies Chtexa.

If emotion and reason are the same ‘in the long run’, then so it seems are religion and science. ‘Clouds and clouds’ of angels follow the Ariadne back to Earth, riding the same Standing Wave as the ship (but the Standing Wave was in a field which ‘relatively rejected the universe’). In that same novel, The Star Dwellers, the children have a tiny transistorised transceiver often unusually employed; as young Sylvia says, ‘Dad uses it to talk to Lucifer.’ (Similarly, the characters in Black Easter listen to Armageddon taking place over Radio Luxembourg. We have to assume that Blish thought such feats possible if there are wholly new ideas of number yet to be revealed.)

Such formulae are passing strange. Therein lies their attraction; they force us to recall the intimate connection between mathematics and reality. Blish’s vision encompasses remote equations where the sedimentary strata of reason are indistinguishable from the igneous deposits of emotion.

He works towards a universe Milton accepted with one that Dirac envisioned, to justify the esoteric problem of evil with the recondite spin of the electron. This is not a problem one meets with regularly in science fiction, yet many people confront it daily. There is always a demand for a New Jerusalem among our dark satanic mills.

As Blake saw eternity in an hour, so the great Mary Somerville, translator of Laplace, saw a proof of the unity of the Deity in Differential Calculus. The American Edward Everett declared, a bit more gushingly, ‘In the pure mathematics we contemplate absolute truths which existed in the divine mind before the morning stars sang together.’ Perhaps Leslie A. White came nearer to Blish’s position – and to Spengler’s – when he remarked that ‘Mathematics is a form of behaviour.’

So could belief in a Dirac transmitter, like absolute trust in God, free us from sin? Such seems to be Blish’s assumption in his justly renowned story, ‘Beep’, published the year after A Case of Conscience and ‘Common Time’. ‘Beep’ builds a remarkable bridge between love and judgment.

In ‘Beep’ we have with a vengeance a culture coming to an end and a fresh idea transforming culture, wrapped up in numerology. The peculiar structure of the story is designed to exhibit these transformations to best effect. (I refer to the original novella, not the slightly revised version published under the Browneian title, The Quincunx of Time.)

One of the pleasing ingenuities of ‘Beep’ lies curled up within its title; like a Samuel Palmer chestnut tree alert within the confines of a conker, so a forest of implications unpacks from the title’s meaningless seed of noise. Here we encounter ‘Common Time’ Garrard’s dream come true: the ‘panoplies of pure reason’ can be unravelled in less than ‘a single day of ship-time’ through the Dirac computer. This achievement results in a universe of rigid causal laws; the banishment of Chaos, the imposition of an Order more rigorous than anything we could achieve today with our inferior math.

‘Beep’ contains a central image, which, being a numerological incantation, banishes all devils:

‘I’ve heard the commander of a world-line cruiser, [says one of the characters] travelling from 8873 to 8704 along the world-line of the planet Hathshepa, which circles a star on the rim of NGC 4725, calling for help across eleven million light years – but what kind of help he was calling for, or will be calling for, is beyond my comprehension.’

Communication, however, mysterious at first, is achieved; help is forthcoming.

Communication begets communion. ‘Beep’ concerns one of the central problems of a galactic civilisation, how to overcome those immense lines of communication stretching across space and time. Blish’s Dirac transmitter provides a remarkable solution to the problem. For not only does it in part abolish space and time (bringing the metagalactic centre to our doorsteps, so to speak) but it proves to be, in effect, a machine which abolishes the Problem of Evil, root and branch. Heisenberg-Born-Dirac wield more clout than the Holy Trinity.

The story goes on to demonstrate what good effects follow – including having one of the characters married almost forcibly to a transvestite lady of mixed ancestry (to his great benefit).

Unravelling the skeins of this strange tale, Blish posits that if freewill could be removed from human affairs there would be no sin (a contrary assumption, if I have my theology correct, to the ones in A Case of Conscience – and, par example, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange).

Determinism shapes all activity: human consciousness is ‘just along for the ride’, or ‘helpless’. An embodiment of this is the Richard Strauss persona, resurrected to create a masterpiece, in ‘A Work of Art’. Again, events rule. Blish manages to make this hellish proposition sound utopian. The world of ‘Beep’ is the happiest one in the Blishian canon; as one of the characters remarks, ‘The news is always good.’

This connection between instant communication and freedom from sin is bold – yet we commonly equate non-communication (secrecy) with wickedness. Blish makes the situation real by showing what tender care is taken by the Service to see that lovers always meet as planned, thus maintaining future events in their predestinate grooves. Never before did Secret Service so closely resemble Marriage Bureau.

Most SF writers, slaves to catastrophes, portray instant communication as something which can be seized upon and perverted to further the aims of the conqueror. In ‘Beep’, it is seized upon to bring further peace. Is Blish trying to equate instant communication with perfect communion? There seems no other way to explain why his all-powerful Service is so incorruptible. The Event Police have become veritable Angels on Earth.

Other riddles attend us. We puzzle at the way Blish has planted two people in disguise – one in the inner, one in the outer story. They assume their disguises for devious purposes, yet neither meets with so much as mild disapproval when they are discovered.

Perhaps deception carries no penalties in a utopia. The deceit is maintained for benevolent ends (though theologians, not least Ruiz-Sanchez, would look askance at that). But, in this utopia, deceit cannot be feared, since there is no aggression. If you remove reasons for aggression, will aggression vanish? Does the wish to throw stones disappear on a perfectly sandy beach? Useless to ask such questions about the world of ‘Beep’, since the Dirac transmitter makes cause and effect inoperative by rendering the whole universe totally open to scrutiny. After such knowledge, there is no room for Judgment Day.

If you grant that ‘Beep’ is of a utopian disposition, then you have to grant that it is a rare sort of story indeed, even among Blish’s cabinet of curiosities. I know of no other galactic empire which could be remotely regarded as utopian; in general, the sewers of these glittering Trantors are clogged with the dismembered bodies of the oppressed. Yet, given angelic guidance, even Trantor could be made to blossom.

James Blish, in his wisdom, did a lot of strange things. He was a thinker, a maker, until the day of his death. Unlike so many science fiction writers – enslaved by editors, formulae and prospect of riches – he did not grow less interesting as he grew older, as he engaged in a daily fight with death and the night shapes. One of the themes that ‘Common Time’, ‘Beep’, and A Case of Conscience have in common is immortality: immortality of thought, immortality of material things, immortality of evil. When the city of Dis makes its dreadful apparition in the seared lands of America which Blish had by then vacated, we feel it as an eruption of a dreadful cancer – largely forgotten, yet ever-living.

In the volumes of the Cities in Flight series, along with the spin-dizzies go the anti-death drugs that confer extreme longevity on all. In the years when Blish was writing of Mayor Amalfi and the cities, he was carefree enough to use the idea as no more than a plot-device. But the evil days would come, and what was merely thought would be entirely felt. Reason and emotion would unite.

Like Mayor Amalfi, James Blish has made the perilous crossing into another state of being, where perhaps little survives but mathematics. In the words of Browne, he is ‘by this time no Puny among the mighty Nations of the Dead; for tho’ he left this World not many Days past, yet every Hour you know largely addeth unto that dark Society; and considering the incessant Mortality of Mankind, you cannot conceive that there dieth in the whole Earth so few as a thousand an Hour.’

As for the works Blish left behind, there were, as we might anticipate, several that will remain incomplete and uncompleted; for those that are complete we must be grateful. At their best, the cadences of his prose are spare, capable of keeping us alive to the unsparing intellect behind them. His originality, his unquenchable thirst for knowledge, must always ensure that we remember his name when the rolls of leading science fiction writers are called; but he would seek no finer epitaph than that which one of his characters bestowed on mankind: ‘We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.’